Volume 4 | Issue 1 | Autumn-Winter 2008

Why a speculation on unexpected epiphanies to head up this issue’s editorial? Because, simply put, it summarises both an aesthetic and a political intention, one that Vertigo aspires to in philosophy and practice; always to remain porous in one’s relations to the world. Actively to be seeking and yet open to the uncontrolled. To pay attention. To glean widely, ever alert to the startle and the dazzle and the richly-hued, but always, open eyes and hands, with that ‘moral code’. That we are not alone in this pursuit is obvious. That we are only a small part of a network of committed gleaners is clearly apparent. For our role in the trajectory we have many to thank: as ever our contributors, as ever our readers, and those who share their fine wares with us. Somehow things continue; steps forward are still made. Things that matter continue to be defended. May it be so for some time yet to come.

Content

Bruce Conner, who died in San Francisco on July 7th 2008, led more lives in his 74 years than most of us could begin to imagine. An unpredictable and inveterate trickster, he made sculptures, collages, films, prints, drawings, paintings, photos, light shows and even stood for political office.

Filmmakers render aspects of nature, human activity and imagination visible. The documentary film continues to be a potent form in all its variety, from the personal video diary to ''objective'' fly-on-the-wall shoots, to the hybrid fact/fiction (''faction'') film.

The lonely legendary figure of Dreyer haunts world cinema like a part-forgotten ancestor. Serious filmmakers know his presence; audiences (not their fault) hardly at all. To place him historically: born a year before Ibsen wrote Hedda Gabler, already a young journalist when Strindberg died...

Nightwatching is Peter Greenaway’s first feature film since the expansive database logic and the dizzying brilliance of his multimedia opus, The Tulse Luper Suitcases. Offering a relatively more straightforward narrative arc, Greenaway’s 2007 film bears many of the director’s hallmarks...

October 2008 marks the publication of the first new translation for 40 years (and the first-ever complete translation) of the Marquis de Sade’s legendary 120 Days of Sodom – ‘the book that dominates all books’, as Georges Bataille wrote, and a seminal inspiration for filmmakers from Luis Buñuel onwards.

The story of my grandparents’ dramatic arrival in Britain wasted no time in establishing itself as the legend at the heart of our off-beat family identity. My grandmother Maroussia came from a fabulously wealthy Jewish family in the Ukraine before the 1917 Russian Revolution.

Jonas Mekas is often referred to as the ‘godfather’ of American avant-garde filmmaking, having fulfilled numerous roles in promoting and cultivating experimental film in America. It is his own filmmaking, however, that should ultimately be seen to be his greatest contribution.

Founded by a pair of New York-based film critics, Andrew Grant and Aaron Hillis, Benten Films announced their existence a little over a year ago when they released the DVD of a film called LOL. An early instalment in a very loose movement of low-budget independent American titles...

This spring, just out of earshot of the White House, Fay Wray screamed for some 700 hours. The occasion was a loop of Christoph Girardet’s masterpiece Suspension, a cut-up rendition of Wray’s squirms and howls from King Kong, given a giant projection at the Hirshhorn Museum on the Washington Mall.

Alexander Sokurov recently visited London to accept this year’s ‘Time for Peace’ film award for his latest feature Alexandra. The prize is given to works which promote humanist ideals, and Sokurov’s film, with its moments of fragile peace grasped from the savage conflict in Chechnya, is a worthy winner...

The beginning and end of Hôtel du Nord, directed by Marcel Carné in 1938, are palindromic. The opening credits, backed by various images of canal activity, are followed by a sidelong shot of a footbridge across which two young lovers are entering frame left.

In August, in the North Eastern Scottish town of Nairn where she lives, Tilda Swinton and I put on a quirky wee community festival called the ‘Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams’. We named our days ‘½’ , ‘1 ½’, ‘2 ½’ etc. On our final day, 8 ½, we played Fellini’s film of the same name.

The omens are looking good for Quantum of Solace, the coming James Bond film. The film’s director Marc Forster contributes the concluding chapter, ‘What Would Tarkovsky Do?’ to the new critical collection Tarkovsky, claiming that he asks himself this question whenever presented with a directorial problem.

Jean Renoir once remarked that in the work of his Egyptian fellow film director Youssef Chahine, "reality is always enchanting". Chahine, who has died at the age of 82 following a brain haemorrhage, made more than 40 feature films: his work increasingly explored a not uncritical nationalism

Throughout filmmaker Richard Stanley’s work there emerges a series of auteuristic concerns which have been built up and consolidated throughout his feature films and documentaries: a preoccupation with the Spaghetti Western and apocalyptic scenarios, the nomadic image of the Man with no Name...

If English-speaking audiences have managed to digest La Grande Bouffe and perhaps some audacious (celluloi)diners have tasted The Harem or Bye, Bye Monkey, they can now proceed with a more substantial course consisting of eight succulent ‘delicacies’ prepared by the chef in person, monsieur Marco Ferreri.

Channel 4 was set up by Act of Parliament in 1981, with a remit to innovate and to cater for audiences not already served by television. While advertising revenue was plentiful and there were only two commercial channels sharing the business, funding could easily be found for experimentation.

One of Britain’s most distinctive filmmaking talents, Asif Kapadia established himself internationally with two award-winning films, The Sheep Thief and The Warrior, which immediately marked him out from the purveyors of the tunnel-vision urban realism that dominates this island’s cinema.

In the three volumes of Desire and Sexuality: Animating the Unconscious Jayne Pilling, the collection Editor and director of the British Animation Awards, has brought together a variety of visually striking and emotionally resonant animated shorts.

Benedek Fliegauf is one of the foremost filmmakers in the new wave of Hungarian Cinema. Working within the metaphysical traditions of Tarkovsky and Bela Tarr he is also a dedicated experimentalist within cinematic form, from the Dogme-informed intimacy of Forest...

‘Acting is inevitable as soon as we walk out of our front doors and into society.’ So wrote Arthur Miller in his essay On Politics and the Art of Acting (Viking, 2001). ‘We are ruled more by the arts of performance – by acting, in other words – than anybody wants to think about for very long.’

Marine Court in St Leonards-on-Sea is a period survival, a gaunt remnant from the age when concrete was king. It was once the tallest residential structure in Britain. In a promotional brochure of 1938 it was described as a ‘Hymn to the Sun’.

The Western Lands is a 70 minute film-essay on love, loss and landscape. An autobiography in 12 landscapes under 12 sunsets. 12 film sequences under the dying of the light. 12 natural fades to black… 11 cuts back to light again.

Most contemporary cinema doesn’t really cover the world we drive through or explore the phenomenon of driving: the state of driving and driving’s state of mind, the road and going on the road, logging our daily landscapes, the stuff against which we unconsciously measure ourselves...

Facing out to sea like a majestic ocean liner, the restored Modernist masterpiece that is De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill is first and foremost an architectural statement. It is about space – managed architectural space but also about social space and how it is used both by communities and individuals.

Following an encounter with a lute-playing anthropologist Pocahontas enthusiast in Essex, UK last summer, artist Anna Lucas travelled around Virginia, USA in the autumn of 2007 suing the local legendary figure of Pocahontas as a virtual guide.

Following the success of her short film Petrolia set in the oilfields of the Cromarty Firth, filmmaker Emily Richardson directs her camera south to the loneliest stretch of the East Suffolk coast at Orford Ness, a remote shingle spit that was once a top secret military testing site, now long abandoned to the elements.

The Temporary Autonomous Zone “is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the state, a guerrilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to reform elsewhere / elsewhen, before the state can crush it.”

Volume 4 - Issue 1 - Autumn-Winter 2008

This issue is dedicated to the memory of filmmakers Humberto Solas, Youssef Chahine and the film critic/painter Manny Farber, all of whom showed us how to see the world differently, all the better to imagine the possibilities of change.